Sliding, and Sweeping, With a Swoosh

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Nike’s made shoes for Olympians in every sport from track and field to equestrian riding to weightlifting. So when the company signed a sponsorship deal with USA Curling, it only stood to reason that they’d take on another Olympic sport with highly specialized footwear needs.

You see, curling is one of the few sports in the world where the two shoes are completely asymetrical. Each player has a foot that they slide on when they’re releasing a stone — that foot needs a very low friction bottom to enable a smooth slide. The other foot needs a very soft rubber sole to allow for good traction on the ice, and also a reinforced toe to stand up to being dragged after each shot.

No one from Nike was very familiar with the game when they started working on the shoes. “We did what we do when we come to any new sport,” says Tobie Hatfield, the director of Nike’s so-called “Innovation Kitchen.” “You look at the game, what’s involved, what other products there are. But most importantly, you talk to the athletes, and find out what they need, or want.”

The 2006 Olympic Men’s curling team went to Oregon to talk to designers, where they outlined their wishlist. One of the more prominent desires: a little more flash and color than the standard curling shoe, which is available in any color you like, as long as it’s black.

“They said they didn’t want anything outlandish,” says Hatfield. “But they said we could have a little fun.”

The result is the slightly shiny blue of the Zoom Hammer, as Nike dubbed the shoe.

Technologically, Nike chose to make the shoe out of synthetic leather, rather than the natural leather used in most curling shoes. “We were looking for a material that was hydrophobic, so it wouldn’t pick up moisture from the ice during a match,” says Hatfield.

For the slider, Nike used a pure PTFE plate — a material that’s better know as Teflon. It performed great sliding across the ice, but it did present some challenges.

“As you might imagine, it’s not the easiest thing to bond to other materials in a shoe,” says Hatfield. “We had to send it out for plasma coating before we could glue it.”

For small production products like this, Nike makes all of the shoes at its Beaverton, Oregon campus. If the curling shoe get put into production — the company doesn’t rule it out — they would then transfer that production overseas.

The result has the American men winning style points on the ice at the Vancouver Olympic Centre, if not games. The US team has struggled to a 2-4 record in the 10 team round robin phase of the curling competition — they will likely have to win the rest of their matches to make it to the medal round.

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